Big Basin Heartbreak

The news of the CZU Lightning Fire in California hit home for me this past week as the fire swept through Big Basin Redwood State Park—California’s oldest state park and protected habitat of the endangered Marbled Murrelet. This robin-sized seabird comes inland from the Pacific Ocean to the mature and old-growth forests during the summer to nest on the wide branches of the trees. Big Basin Redwood State Park was the center of the discovery of the murrelets’ nesting site in 1974 in a 220-foot-high Douglas-fir, the kind—and perhaps very tree that held that famous nest—that are being burned and scorched now as the fire engulfs 78,000 acres of Santa Cruz and San Mateo Counties. Many of the redwoods will survive—there is some good news here from KQED.

While writing my book , Rare Bird: Pursuing the Mystery of the Marbled Murrelet (Rodale 2005 and Mountaineers Books 2014), about this extraordinary bird, I spent much time in this spectacular “big-trees” state park visiting the site of the nest discovery, camping with my family under the very tree where the nest was found, and hiking the park trails under thousand-year-old trees and feeling as if I had walked back in time.

Photo of the author at Big Basin Redwood State Park (by M.D. Ruth)

Big Basin Redwood State Park’s historic Headquarters and Visitors Center burned to the ground (details and photos here) and there is extensive damage in the historic core of the 18,000-acre park, including the popular campgrounds. The headquarters building was the site where the park rangers and historian gazed down on a strange downy chick, saved by a tree trimmer in the August 1974, that they identified out as a marbled murrelet—the first confirmed and later documented scientific evidence that these birds nested in trees. Now this historic building is gone.

The remains of the headquarters building at Big Basin Redwood State Park, the site where park rangers solved the great nesting mystery of the marbled murrelet in August 1974. Image by Randy Vazquez/MediaNews Group/The Mercury News Via Getty Images

The 1974 discovery eventually placed the murrelet on the list of federally threatened and endangered species and helped project much of its nesting habitat from logging—the single biggest threat to this bird’s survival. While the redwoods and other conifers are thick-barked species and adapted to withstand fire, the murrelets themselves are not adaptable. Their populations in California and throughout their range (north to Alaska) have been declining precipitously. The increased frequency, intensity, and duration of wildlife is not merely a “threat” to these and other birds and wildlife. These fires are happening now.

Please consider making a donation to the Sempervirens Fund to help restore Big Basin Redwood State Park. The Sempervirens Fund is a non-profit land trust dedicated to the conservation of forests in the Santa Cruz Mountains. To the first 20 of my readers who donate $50 to help restore Big Basin Redwood State Park, I will send you a complimentary copy of my book, Rare Bird: Pursuing the Mystery of the Marbled Murrelet. Just send me (mariaruthbooks@comcast.net) a screenshot of the to of the email acknowledging your donation and your mailing address. Thank You!

Send me a screen shot like this (with your name in the To field and I’ll send you a copy of Rare Bird!

State's Marbled Murrelet Strategy Finalized

December 3rd’s Board of Natural Resources meeting in Olympia, Washington, brought to an uneasy conclusion the development of the state’s conservation strategy for the endangered Marbled Murrelet. The meeting was appropriately long (5+ hours) and gripping thanks to a very engaged board, much public comment, and agreement that today’s vote was “historic” given the twenty-two years that have passed since the “interim” conservation strategy for the murrelet was put into place.

The upshot: Alternative H was approved in a 4-2 vote with Clallam County Commissioner Bill Peach and Jim Cahill (Senior Budget Assistant to Governor Inslee for Natural Resources) voting “nay” and the rest “yay.” For those of you following this issue, Alternative H was not the alternative preferred by the conservation coalition (Washington Forest Law Center, Washington Environmental Council, Defenders of Wildlife, Conservation Northwest, Olympic Forest Coalition, Seattle Audubon) and other murreleteers as it does not provide enough conservation benefit for marbled murrelets. Nor was Alternative H the preferred alternative of the timber industry and trust beneficiaries as it does not provide enough revenue and jobs. Alternative H, according to the DNR and US Fish and Wildlife Service, meets the requirements under the Endangered Species Act and also the DNR’s fiduciary responsibility to the trust beneficiaries. And, in striking the “right balance” between conservation and revenue generation, the DRN has made no one happy.

Commissioner Peach voted nay on Alt H because he stated his belief that it does not represent the best interests of the trust beneficiaries. He is concerned that the financial impacts to the junior taxing districts have not been clearly explained by the DNR to the board or members of the public. Peach moved to delay today’s vote until March 2020 but his motion was not seconded and so failed.

This fall, Audubon chapters and others in the conservation community also advocated for a delay in the vote (for different reasons) but it became clear later on that such a delay could open the door to involvement by the Department of Interior (via Rep. Jaime Herrera Beutler and Southwest Washington timber industry) and result in an alternative with less conservation value to murrelets.

Jim Cahill voted nay, he stated, because Governor Inslee requested he do so because of his gubenatorial concerns about changes in ocean conditions and what it has done to the marbled murrelet. (I think there is more behind this request, but I am not privy to Inslee’s insights on murrelet conservation issues).

Alternative H is definitely not the win-win everyone was hoping for but with DNR’s mutually exclusive (in my opinion) orders to protect marbled murrelets and log their nesting habitat, Alt H is meh-meh at best. The proof will be when the strategy gets played out on the ground—in the forestlands where murrelets nest.

The highlight of Tuesday’s meeting for me came toward the very end of the meeting when Board Member Chris Reykdal, Superintendent of Public Schools gave this impassioned 3-minute speech (recorded by TVW) about the future of Washington State and the funding of K-12 school construction from DNR timber sales.

The pith of Reykdal’s three minutes: “The $80-90 million that K-12 gets in school construction—we need to phase off that in time. This money has to go to counties. It has to go to the industries that are impacted by these decisions and ultimately to species preservation and habitat preservation.”

Indeed, de-linking school construction from timber harvest is long overdue and it would be a real victory if Reykdal could accomplish this through the state legislature rather than the U.S. Supreme Court (upon entering the Union, Congress mandated the newly formed Washington state use a portion of its natural resources generate revenue to fund schools, hospitals, reform institutions, and other social services; it did not, however, specify logging).

The seven years of board meetings have been largely civil and congenial, especially under the leadership of Public Lands Commissioner Hilary Franz. The board members expressed their gratitude to DNR staff and also to the members of the public who have been showing up at meetings over the past several years. I think they were sincere.

So, this wraps up a very long effort to craft a Long-Term Conservation Strategy for one very special bird and its extraordinary habitat. My thanks to you all for your attention to this complex and important issue. I have a hunch it’s not quite over yet since a large swath of the public audience at the board meetings these any years are lawyers.

My hope is that the murrelet will have the last word on this.

Listen here to its call: https://www.allaboutbirds.org/guide/Marbled_Murrelet/sounds

Gratitude for This Bird

There are no holidays celebrating the Marbled Murrelet, unless you count my recent attempt to start “Nest Discovery Day” to honor the date of August 7, 1974, when the nest of this unique seabird was first discovered and documented by scientists. My celebration was just really a “whoohoo!” on social media and silly video involving a friend in a chicken suit, but that’s because I didn’t think to consult anyone at Hallmark, Inc.

The traditional Thanksgiving holiday is mostly about turkey, but the much much smaller and seriously endangered Marbled Murrelet has been the focus of my attention these days and I’m grateful for that. This little wisp of a bird is in the middle of a fight for its life and for the future of the forests where it nests in the Pacific Northwest. The forests murrelets need are described with various terms: old-growth, older, late seral, late successional, mature. The murrelet needs these trees not because of the age or size of the tree itself, but because of the size of the upper branches of these trees. A murrelet doesn’t build a nest but lays its one egg directly on the branch (usually moss covered, but sometimes bare) and so it needs a wide branch where its chicken-sized egg can be safely nestled. And it needs these branches to be at least 50 feet off the ground to keep the nest safe from ground-based predators. Such branches are found in big old trees—coastal redwood, Douglas fir, western hemlock, western red-cedar, Sitka spruce, and other varieties (including the rare occurrence in a big-leaf maple and red alder).

These trees are vanishing and so are the murrelets. Since 2001, we have lost 44% of the murrelet population in Washington state alone. The population continues to decline at the rate of about 4% every year. That might not sound like much, but if you lose 4 of every 100 murrelets every year, it doesn’t take long to get to zero. Zero is not acceptable. This is why, nearly 20 years since I first met the Marbled Murrelet in a photo on the Internet (teehee), 12 years since my book, Rare Bird: Pursuing the Mystery of the Marbled Murrelet was published, and 5 years since it was reissued in paperback…I am still talking about this bird.

I am not talking about Marbled Murrelets to sell copies of Rare Bird. I am talking about this bird because I cannot bear the thought of “losing my marbled”—of having this bird vanish from our oceans and coastal forests. By talking about the Marbled Murrelet I mean I am speaking out for it—to forest management agencies, conservation organizations, library patrons, bookshop audiences, nature-writing workshop attendees, interested friends, and tolerant family members who know I have a difficult time stopping once I start talking about this crazy little bird.

I am grateful to everyone who listens and to everyone who talks about this bird themselves. The most difficult conversations being had right now are the ones between the many people who manage the forests where the murrelet nests, the people who must generate revenue by logging these forests, and those intent on protecting these forest for murrelets. Not that opinions break cleanly along these lines. The subject of how to manage murrelets makes for complex, messy, fraught, long, interrupted, and frustrating conversations. I have been part of many of these conversations. Everyone feels trapped between a rock and hard place, facing a binary choice between saving the murrelets from extinction (possibly in our lifetime) or merely slowing down the decline to a rate we define as tolerable—the rate that will keep our children or grandchildren from cursing us.

I am grateful for the Marbled Murrelet itself for luring me to the west coast, into the deep forests where it nests and into these conversations about others about biodiversity, old-growth ecosystems, the Endangered Species Act, why birds matter, and the subtle and serious impacts of climate change on murrelets and our forest. The murrelet has given me the opportunity to think long and hard about my role as a steward and advocate, about how to walk the talk, how to resist “slacktivism” and eco-burnout, and how to let my heart go “zing” whenever I see this rare bird in the wild or in a photograph.

Who ever you are and how ever long your “life list,” let a bird into your heart. Let it live there a while. Soon it will let you know what it needs from you to survive. And what it needs is likely to be exactly what we need to survive. Listen. And give thanks.

What Murrelets Need

What tree surgeon Hoyt Foster discovered in 1974--a Marbled Murrelet chick hunkered down on a branch 148 up a Douglas-fir--provided critical clues to the nesting habitat of this federally threatened little seabird. 

Marbled Murrelets need a wide branch, preferably covered in moss, at least 50 feet up a tree that is >150 years old and no more than 55 miles from salt water. This kind of habitat was once amply available along the Pacific Northwest coast. Now, that habitat has been reduced to patches and fragments and the murrelet population has been steadily crashing.

In Washington state, the population has dropped 44% between 2001 and 2015 and continues to decline at the rate of 4% a year. This means, based on the 2016 population in our state, that we will losing 284 murrelets a year. The primary cause is the historic and ongoing logging of our old-growth and mature coastal forests.

On September 7, 2018, the Department of Natural Resources released a long-term conservation strategy that will help determine the fate the of the Marbled Murrelet on the 576,000 acres of land it manages for these birds and other wildlife. Much this acreage is habitat, but not all of it. An estimated 154,000 acres consist of murecelt nesting habitat. As you might imagine, the management of this habitat is hotly contested. The mature and old-growth forests provide both valuable revenue to our state when horizontal; they provide critical habitat to murrelets for nesting when left vertical. 

What Marbled Murrelets do not need is Jaime Herrera Beutler, the U.S. Congressperson representing Washington's 3rd district in southwest Washington. Though she believes she is doing the right thing to protect family-wage jobs in her district, her efforts in the murrelet arena are misguided (which is to say guided by the timber industry and misinformation) and will surely backfire if she continues to refuse to understand the basic habitat needs of the murrelet. Her constituents have more to lose than gain by supporting her position on managing our state forest lands.

Rep. Herrera Beutler introduced an amendment to the House Appropriations Bill for Interior & Environment that would essentially result in the logging of everything but the bare essentials for nesting murrelets. Here is the text of her short-sighted bill.

This stingy bill should not be supported. It proposes to protect only the highest-quality forest stands. It will create silos of habitat for the murrelet and other species that benefit from contiguous blocks of forest. It will not contribute to the recovery of this imperiled species. It will not meet the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Services criteria required of the Department of Natural Resources to continue legally harvesting their state trust lands.  

Jaime Herrera Beutler's amendment offers a bulldozer at a time when we need are well-honed axes, sharpened pencils, and sharp minds.

In its recently revised Draft Environmental Impact Statement, the Department of Natural Resources has offered several options for protecting forest lands that will eventually grow into murrelet nesting habitat. While it may irk some to set aside younger forests for future murrelet habitat, this is what is needed to give this bird a fighting chance. 

Murrelet chick ready to fledge. (Photo courtesy Hamer Environmental).